The main concern of Sylvia Plath's poem “Lady Lazarus” is how the speaker views her relationship with men; the emotions associated with her vision of sex are equated with death and the desire for her to die. This metaphor of death, used throughout the poem, parallels how she sees sex as an act worse than death and the fact that the institution of marriage is not just a prison, but for her can be likened to a camp Nazi concentration camp. By analyzing each metaphorical section (the concentration camp, the mummy Lazarus, the circus, and the phoenix) and examining literary techniques such as insertion and repetition of lines, it can be concluded that the speaker equated marriage and conventional relationships with a prison (or concentration camp), and when trapped by this, would rather consider herself dead, rather than acknowledge any sexual acts in that marriage. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Starting with the second stanza and continuing with the third: “Bright as a Nazi lampshade, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face is a shapeless, fine/Jewish linen” (lines 5-9) - you can immediately see how he is comparing something (which you later learn is a relation) to the Holocaust, particularly the way the Nazis viewed the Jews as household products worth nothing more than the material goods produced by their torture and, ultimately, from death. The fact that the speaker focuses on objects commonly found in the home is symbolic in the aspect that she feels trapped in domestic life, as a possession, where she also feels tortured poem as a personal holocaust, due to the persecution he fears and experiences. The second metaphor to examine is that of Lazarus, the namesake of the poem, the speaker feels that he has the power to rise from the dead flesh / The cave-eaten grave will be / At home on me. / And I'm a smiling woman. (16-20)This passage refers to the resurrection of Lazarus emerging from the cave. The speaker uses this to show her inner strength: that when forced into a cave, alongside a relationship, she will emerge better than before, that this rebirth will end the torturous time, and that she will smile outwardly through the ordeal. In the next stanza, lines 23-24 – “What rubbish / Annihilating every decade” – shows the reader that she is equating something with death, that about every ten years something powerful happens that forces her to see the last decade as a waste . This is the emergence of his views on sex in the poem. Here she is referring to a forced sexual act or some form of abuse that has occurred twice in the speaker's life and which she fears may happen again. Stanzas 12 and 13 give us limited background of the speaker; he notes in lines 35 and 36: “The first time it happened I was ten years old. / It was an accident." By now, it has been established that he equates death with sex, as he could not have actually died a physical death at the age of ten; his statement that it was an accident demonstrates his youthful innocence , so much so that even twenty years later he can argue that a sexual act could have been an accident. In the next stanza, he states: "The second time I meant / to last and not return at all" (37-38). reader that for the second time, chronologically at age twenty, the speaker no longer wanted anything to do with the sexual act, or for her, the pain and suffering that "death" or sex they carried. But then he continues by saying that “Dying / is an art... / Lo., 2002. 519-521.